Do you ever get ahead of yourself? Find yourself mentally an entire day ahead? Thinking it’s a day or even two ahead of where you really are? I have caught myself doing this both last week and this week. It’s finals week so it’s been very easy for me to “live for the weekend” recently. As I muse on this thought a couple things have come to my mind.
1. We do have many beautiful things to come but we must remain in this moment. In Hebrews there is a beautiful command for us to live in the here and now, the writer of Hebrews in chapter 12 says this about Jesus, “who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
Jesus in the garden, pleading with the Lord, knew that in that moment what the Creator God was asking of him. Jesus, living in the moment, looking through the cross into eternity knowing what was to come…this is a profound thought to me. Jesus seeing through the cross ahead of him to the glory we could then share with him being seated at the right hand of God.
I so often get so concerned with things to come that I am robbed of the joy and beauty that is my life in that moment. When I’m living for the weekend and am not engaged in the moment the people in my life are the ones who truly effected by this.
I want to be in this moment, experiencing new and amazing things with them daily. I refuse to let the enemy lull me into fear and complacency.
2. One of my favorite movies is “Fight Club” and in the film there is a sweet and terrifying scene that involves Ed Norton and Brad Pitt sitting at a table. Brad Pitt leans down and kisses the top of Ed’s hand, then pours lye onto the spot he’s just kissed giving him a horrible chemical burn. As the lye begins to eat into his skin Ed begins to shoot off into his imagination to numb the pain but then is slapped back to reality by Brad.
Brad says two lines that are brilliant:
1. “This is the best moment of your life and you’re off somewhere missing it!”
How often do we miss the most important moments of our lives because we’re off missing it, sifting through our minds? We waste our days dreaming of a future that we’re not promised and putting our confidence in things we don’t even have(money, fame or renown).
2. “You have know, not fear, know that some day you are going to die.”
In our context, as believers in Christ, we have to remember Hebrews 12 that Jesus has conquered death, and in that we know that we are going to physically die…but this is merely a physical death, we have an inexplicable and scandalous eternal future ahead of us.
When we know that we are going to die, that our physical life is coming to an end then we are finally free to live in this very moment.
In closing, when I’m in weeks like this where I’m in a bit of a funk and I keep getting my days wrong I have to slow down and remind myself of a couple simple things.
Slow down, enjoy today.
Jesus’ own brother James had this to say about living in the moment too:
13 Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” 14 Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”
- -James 4:13-15
Jesus has a brilliant thing to say and a hilariously simple question that he poses.
“ 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”
Who can add a single day to their lives by worrying or dreaming for tomorrow?
I want to be in this moment…
I want to see shadows of the Gospel play out in my daily life…
I hope you do too.
Be here…we are amazingly blessed and don’t even know it.
No comments:
Post a Comment